Zero Punctuation: Lords of the Fallen - Imitation is Flattery?

Sonicron

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Mar 11, 2009
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Sounds to me like Yahtzee kinda liked Lords of the Fallen while admitting he only does so because he's a sucker for Dark Souls, and he sees it as a Dark Souls clone, warts and all. Disregarding the obvious and quite valid criticism, that's still high praise coming from the likes of him.

I tried Dark Souls once and couldn't get very far past an early boss fight. I concluded it wasn't for me because it's just too hard, and yet the decision still smarts because everything else about Dark Souls is the epitome of a siren song to me. Meanwhile, I read a lot of user reviews saying that Lords of the Fallen is basically Dark Souls but a bit easier, and the (apparently) scaled down difficulty coupled with the 'spiky-and-edgy' design I love so much (Warhammer fan here) could mean this game is exactly what I've been waiting for.
This game is going on my 'should buy once I have a PS4' list.
 

Miral

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Jun 6, 2008
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Darth_Payn said:
Kurt Cristal said:
Was hoping for a review of Gat out of Hell, but considering its brevity maybe you can rope it in with a double feature after the inevitable review of Dying Light? Maybe Life is Strange? That's a unique game based on existing ideas!
Yahtzee likes to do double features about games that have something in common, so Saint's Row: Gat out of Hell would have to be paired with something like it. Then again, if GooH is a DLC add-on, then don't hold your breath. He's not a fan of DLC. I keep waiting for him to give his take on Assassin's Creed rogue, since it has all the sailing he like from Black Flag, it turns the basic premise of the AC story upside-down, and he could try the Irish accent of the main character.
GooH technically isn't DLC, since you can play it without having the original game. It merely resembles DLC in price, length, and being a spinoff of the main game. But those are good things.
 

shrekfan246

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May 26, 2011
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Arthain said:
I wonder if Yahtzee would ever review one of those niche Japanese titles that were ported to english, such as, say, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. I love that game but boy, they really are a niche title, and for good reason.
I wouldn't say it's impossible, but I wouldn't hold my breath either. Yahtzee is pretty outspokenly not fond of most JRPGs (Dark Souls aside).

Warachia said:
Dark Souls wasn't really unique either though, the combat was taken from Monster Hunter and nearly everything else from random folklore.
Eh, while Demon's Souls/Dark Souls-Monster Hunter is one of the first connections I'd make while talking about either series, I'd say Monster Hunter's combat is a bit more convoluted than the Souls games. The essence is similar in that it's all about positioning, timing, knowing the battlefield and how to move around it, and knowing when you have an opening, but the actual implementation isn't quite as familiar.
 

The Dead Singer

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I only ever played Monster Hunter Tri (which I didn't finish though I did sink in about 50 ours into it) but I remember it being loads clunkier than any Souls game by far.
 

Haru17

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Yahtzee better review Monster Hunter 4 after copping out at the start of Tri.
 

Daaaah Whoosh

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I was hoping to pick this game up after beating Dark Souls, but considering my relationship with Quelagg, I don't think I'll have to worry about it for a while.
 

Haru17

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The Dead Singer said:
I only ever played Monster Hunter Tri (which I didn't finish though I did sink in about 50 ours into it) but I remember it being loads clunkier than any Souls game by far.
Have you even looked at the UI in any From Software game? In the tutorial at the beginning of dark souls 1 I tried to figure out how to kick, the sign said it was LS + R1. Naturally after 5 minutes of clicking the left stick, as there was no directional signage, I discovered the sign meant you need to push the left stick forward while pressing R1. I don't know what that is, but it's sure a helluva lot 'clunkier' than Tri ever was.

I prefer Monster Hunter because you don't have to grind through overpowered trash mobs in boring, drab environments, but rather cut (mostly) to the chase, hunting huge, *unique* bosses for the vast majority of the game. Monster Hunter also isn't based around frequent death, a mechanic that means the unwilling interruption of your current activity and is considered by most if not all gamers to be inherently not fun.

And before you go on about 'stakes' and 'investment' in the gameplay Monster Hunter has those too. You wouldn't know until you're 40 minutes into a 50 minute max quest, running from a huge, enraged monster on only a sliver of your health, knowing that a single hit would make your third death (3 strikes and you fail the mission). That, my friends, is tense.
 

Thanatos2k

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Kerethos said:
I won't lie, I rather liked the armor designs I've seen from this game. I'm a sucker for all the moving details.

But I imagine if everything is equally detailed and over designed it will all end up looking too similar to remain interesting for long. After all it's the variety in armor design (from practical to outright silly) that's part of the Souls games identity - something for almost everyone.
Yeah, it's fine if you end up looking like some armored monstrosity at the end of the game fighting giant hulking brutes left and right, but when you START off looking like that there's no visual progression of the power and progression of your character.

Haru17 said:
Have you even looked at the UI in any From Software game? In the tutorial at the beginning of dark souls 1 I tried to figure out how to kick, the sign said it was LS + R1. Naturally after 5 minutes of clicking the left stick, as there was no directional signage, I discovered the sign meant you need to push the left stick forward while pressing R1. I don't know what that is, but it's sure a helluva lot 'clunkier' than Tri ever was.
Um, I understood that right away. It was left stick, not L3.

In any Souls game you don't take a time out in combat to run to a corner and sharpen your weapon. Monster Hunter is beyond clunky.
 

Madame_Lawliet

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I remember VaatiVidya covering this game a ways back, in which he referred to it as a "Souls-like," I don't know if he coined that term or not but it was the first time I'd heard anyone use it. I think that's a term that we're going to be hearing more and more in the next few years, I think Dark Souls (& Demon's Souls before it) were genera definers; kind of like Rouge, Doom, or Diablo, there were FPSes before Doom and there were dungeon crawlers before Diablo, but those games set the standard and defined the parameters of a whole new genera.
Incidentally if you're a Dark Souls fan and you're not already following Vaati's channel then you should be.

Anyways, great video as always, was kinda hoping for Gat out of Hell, but I guess we'll wait and see on that.
 

blackrave

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Mar 7, 2012
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C.TYR said:
What the fuck is this 'Team Hollywood' thing, though?
It is indicator of new and improved Yahtzee
Now with 300% more positivism and enthusiasm
Because if anything I watch Zero Punctuation expecting positivism and enthusiasm of all things.
 

Adeptus Aspartem

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Haru17 said:
[
Monster Hunter also isn't based around frequent death, a mechanic that means the unwilling interruption of your current activity and is considered by most if not all gamers to be inherently not fun.
Just cutting out this little line. I honestly think DS wouldn't have had any succses is this would be even remotely true.
Most people i know and myself had no issues with that. Quite the contrary, the high difficulty and resulting deaths actually challenged me to get better.
Which leads to a really awesome gameplay once you're in the zone, dodging left, right and center and parrying all dem Silverknights till your parry-button breaks.
 

gorfias

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garjian said:
Gorfias said:
Yikes. Dark Souls = hard. So is this. Let me know when G-d Mode cheats available for free!
The classes are basically the difficulty settings for this game, as far as I'm aware and at release at least.

Jim Sterling was playing a Cleric on his stream when the game came out. They have Slow Time, which is bad enough, but also a healing spell... and mana regenerates very quickly in Lords. Jim isn't the best of Souls players but even so, the only thing we saw him die to was gravity. He never even had to use the potions, and therefore, if anything difficult did turn up, he always had a full stock.

If you're looking for a god mode, Cleric is it.
Interesting! I will look for this!
 

RejjeN

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Thanatos2k said:
In any Souls game you don't take a time out in combat to run to a corner and sharpen your weapon. Monster Hunter is beyond clunky.
A bit off topic but... Repair Powder? ;D
 

Azure23

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Warachia said:
Dark Souls wasn't really unique either though, the combat was taken from Monster Hunter and nearly everything else from random folklore.

I will say that I thought it fixed a number of the bullshit things in the Souls series (like not having some planks that you can walk on and some you can't with no visual indication of which is which), but I can also agree it's too short.
As someone who's played a ton of MH (at least until my psp broke and hunting buddies moved away) and a shit ton of Dark souls, I've just gotta ask: how is the combat the same? I mean there are superficial similarities, with positioning and dodging being very important. But beyond that I'm not really seeing the connection. For one thing I always found that the lack of a lock on function changed how I approached a monster dramatically, especially with the focus on tail cutting (which, admittedly, was present in a few souls fights) and body part breaking in general. I suppose you could make the argument that both combat systems are mostly designed with one on one fights in mind, but in MH your character is much less agile than the monsters you're hunting, so positioning is everything. A lot of the time it's the opposite in Dark Souls, your character is usually much faster than your opponents, even to the point that chain backstabbing is the best way to fight larger humanoid enemies.

Anyway I love both series but I always found they played very differently.
 

JUMBO PALACE

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Zendariel said:
It is a shame they don't have a demo available. Especially when the game is so notorious for continuously crashing to desktop on some computers. It really sounds like a gamble to buy it even now few months after release. I would really want to try it but as it stands i'll probably wait for it to drop to around 10? or something.
This is what I was hoping to hear about too. I've kept my eye on the Steam page and forums for this game since launch and the devs are still dragging their heels on patches when some people can't even get past the main menu. I like souls, I like big armor, I like pretty graphics. I want this game but I'm not going to gamble $50.
 

stringtheory

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Sonicron said:
I tried Dark Souls once and couldn't get very far past an early boss fight.
As someone who recently 'broke through the wall' that is your early first playthrough of Dark Souls, I am required to ask which early boss fight were you stuck on?
 

Lord Doom

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I love how it is a picture of Dark Souls 2 everytime he points out the bad points of the Souls game.
 

PunkRex

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Besides from having similar controls I don't really see how Monster Hunter and Dark Souls are that much a like. The prior is about frantically adapting to what ever the monster/environment decides to do, the latter is about trial and error/perfecting a run. I suppose resource management is key to both though so maybe.